High-rate LDPC codes from unital designs

The paper presents a construction of very high-rate low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes based on incidence matrices of unital designs. Like the projective geometry and oval designs, unital designs exist with incidence matrices which are significantly rank deficient. Thus high-rate LDPC codes with a large number of linearly dependent parity-check equations can be constructed. The LDPC codes from unitals have Tanner graphs free of 4-cycles and perform well with iterative decoding, offering new LDPC codes at rates and lengths not available with existing algebraic LDPC codes.